Yea Nix, ganbatte does mean literally "try hard" but my understanding is that it's used where an American English speaker might say "good luck." The Japanese don't generally say "Good luck!" as we do in America, they instead say "Ganbatte!" Yea, the sense is different; you and I might say "Give it your best shot!" Unfortunately, Japanese and English don't translate directly very well, hence I kind of translate for both sense and meaning (unfortunately it's a rather subjective thing; my apologies for not including the literal meaning as well). We could skip the whole mess and just go with osu!
Errr, in that part of Fukushima-ken, there are 4 ALTs total; at this point none of them study kyokushin-kan (I did try to convince them, but I'm not sure if they'll give it a shot now that I'm gone). The school is Okazaki Hiroto-Sensei's school (the Vice Honbu Chief, at the bottom of the kyokushin "About" page) and there's not really anyone in the dojo that speaks very good English. Of course, I didn't speak very good Japanese, but we managed to communicate with each other. If you do go the inaka (rural) Japan route to study kyokushin, it's a good idea to learn Japanese before-hand, but if you're willing to study Japanese while in Japan and give it your best effort, you can really pick up a lot of the language and you can, in fact, communicate.
Osu!